/dev/cake

Something was wrong. I could taste it. I could smell it. A sick kind of pall hung over my computer (god rest her soul). Very gently, I caressed my keyboard, softly, like a lover. I opened my packet sniffer. I checked my firewall. Things were bad, there was some nasty vodoo in the air. Before I could take any action, four words in a big, red, nasty font that made my hair stand on end and my eyes bug out of my head flashed across my console screen*: J00 hAv3 b33n 0Wn3d.

I cut off my connection. Quickly, I traversed my file structure to see if the malignant snot bag was just screwing with me, or if he had trashed my disk. Mostly, everything was there. Reinstalling or carefully combing the software to see if it had been compromised would be a bitch, but at least the raw data looked intact. Then, as I went through my disk, I noticed something was missing. . .something was wrong. Deathly wrong.

I was missing some stuff from /dev. Mostly, it would be just reconfiguring, reinstalling. Nothing major, it looked like, but. . .there was something. Something I couldn't put my finger on. Suddenly it hit me. I sprang up from my chair. I followed the USB cable from the back of my computer to where it should have lead. Instead of what should have been at the other end, there were only a few crumbs. A few, succulent crumbs.

He had taken my cake.

Now it was personal.

*say, how the hell did he make flashing red letters appear on the console, anyway?

were I to guess about the flashing red letters, I would say that he used write(1), to send you a message which contained the text "^[[5m^[31m J00 hAv3 b33n 0Wn3d^[0m ", where the "^[" stands for the escape character, and everything else stands for what it looks like.. (of course, this cake-stealer doesn't seem like the malicious sort, so after using escapes to turn on blink and red (5m and 31m), he/she sets the terminal back to it's normal state (0m).)

so anyway, your intruder probably typed something like

 perl -e 'print "\x1b[2j\x1b[31m\x1b[5mJ00 hAv3 b33n 0Wn3d \x1b[0m"' | write lemuru

which resulted in you seeing what you say. (the string causes the terminal to clear, then turn on blink, turn on red, print the message, and reset the terminal back to normal. "\x1b" is the string containing the escape character, if you're trying to decipher that.) I hope that was helpful.... (wow, I am a geek..)

(and by the way, it's very 1337 of your vt102/xterm/rxvt/whatever to support blink; I am quite impressed..)

I promise it wasn't me who stole your cake, sir